Photographs in this collection have been produced by Heather Do, Connor Rowe, Kathleen Markham, Alison Lowrie, Kenneth Chiu, Katie Salmond, Diana Chavez, Elena Toffalori, Ashley Vink, Aimee O'Dea, Liz Dolinar, Allison Barden, Justine Khoury, Daniele Alaniz-Roux, and Justin Thach at the request of Michael Ashley for the UC Berkeley Anthropology 136e class, Spring 2011. The purpose was to digitally document the cultural heritage of Vesuvio Café to not only document the cultural history embeded into the ageless walls but also to connect spatially the symbiotic relationship that preserves the legacy of beatnik culture today.

Vesuvio Cafe, (37.79757°N 122.40625°W), located in the North Beach region of San Francisco Bay, is a cultural bastion preserving the cultural heritage of bohemian era and the beatnik culture that generated its establishment by Henri Lenoir in 1949 and made infamous by the renown authors such as Jack Kerouac from which the adjacent alley is named. The building in which the bar is housed is otherwise known as the Cavalri building built in 1913 and expanded to a second story in 1918 and designed by Zanolini with Italian Renaissance revival elements. The transient existence of these unkempt literary members and their constituents is reflected in the liminal location of the former saloon restaurant at the border between the vagrant Chinese- Italian communities; by 1970[1], most of the diverse cultures regressed into economical housing . Vesuvio Café despite its rich history back to the 1950’s , are not historically preserved site; in fact, they were rented until 1999[2] by managers Chris and Janet Clyde, whose proprietary hopes to protect the building from other commercial interest. Over the years, Vesuvio has undergone its share of renovations and damages such as the 1999 retrofitting for earthquake safety or even the 1973 damage dealt to the building by an errant bus[3]. Over the years, the "I'll never forget after the retro-ﬁtting, one man came in, he was about 55 years old and in a business suit," Clyde said. "He actually had tears in his eyes when he looked at the place. He said, `You didn't change anything.' Vesuvio has kept its character as a neighborhood bar.”[4]

Photographs in this collection were shot on April 11, 2011 between 7:30 am and 5:00 pm Pacific Time under variable natural lighting due to cloudy skies with intermittent periods of morning exposure conditions. Photos were captured on the following cameras: Canon DSLR XTI/T2i, S95, Sony Cybershot, Canon Powershot. Lenses used include: Macro 60mm, Telephoto 70-200, Canon T2i 18-55mm, Canon XTI 17-85mm. A tripod was used for timelapse, Gigapan, macro, telephoto, HDR, and photogrammetry shots. iPhones were also used for documentation shots and Geo-tagging. The photos were post-processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.

Description written by Kenneth Chiu, following Addison’s proposed virtual heritage metadata format in his chapter “The Vanishing Virtual” in New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage, edited by Kalay, et al., and published by Routledge in 2007.